Share This Story!

Wolff: A liberal takedown of Roger Ailes

This column would otherwise have been a review of The Loudest Voice in the Room, a new book about Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News, by Gabriel Sherman. But, in part because of a column I wrote here last

This column would otherwise have been a review of The Loudest Voice in the Room, a new book about Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News, by Gabriel Sherman. But, in part because of a column I wrote earlier this week — taking positive notice of Ailes' dominance of the cable news business — I am perceived as one of Ailes' supporters and, therefore, expected to take an unfavorable view of a negative book about him.

Potentially critical reviewers didn't get an advance copy of the Ailes book; likely positive reviewers did — a new literary target-marketing strategy. In the case of Ailes, where opinions are almost always black or white — left or right — it must have seemed very easy for the author and the book's publisher, Random House, to identify allies and enemies.

This, then, is not a review of the book but of the media politics surrounding the book — or, really, of what happens when the media become a proxy for politics.

Obviously, the case will be made that Ailes himself has been one of the chief culprits in politicizing the media, turning Fox News into an aggressive polemic for right-wing issues and against left-wing proponents. But by that token, there is not likely to be more objectivity or nuance when the left turns its media guns on the right.

It's a standoff, with each side ready for war and sure of its own virtue, speaking to its own troops.

Sherman, a young reporter with standard liberal bona fides and opinions, came to write about Ailes because Ailes is a liberal bête noire. Ailes, being a liberal bête noire, did not want someone he fairly assumed to have a predictable liberal view to write a book about him.

Three years ago, Ailes and Sherman began sparring from a distance. Ailes hoped Sherman, unable to get access to Ailes and his associates, would give up the project — as is the usual custom among punctilious reporters. Sherman hoped that his persistence and fly-like annoyance would wear down his subject and that ultimately, Ailes would relent and agree to an interview — as often happens. Neither hope came to pass.

Hence, the author and his publisher have taken the marketing-forward position that since Ailes does not want this story told, that must mean this is the real story or, at least, a damaging story, which, if you are a liberal, is the story you want to be real.

Ailes, for his part, is in the not-so-sympathetic position of being a public figure arguing that his story can't fairly be told by someone who doesn't actually know him.

Columnist Michael Wolff.(Photo: Todd Plitt, USA TODAY)

The journalist's handbook recommends that when you don't get access to your subject and are forced to do what's called a "write around," you should go far and wide for sources, using sheer numbers of interviews as the basis of your authority. Sherman keeps announcing that he did "614" interviews — which, to any journalist, is a protest-too-much sort of specificity.

This is the Kitty Kelley method. In her pulpy biographies of Frank Sinatra, Nancy Reagan and others, Kelley — who said she did 1,002 interviews for the Reagan book — employs a quilt of suggestive quotes that can be arranged to almost any effect from people who either wanted to be quoted for self-interested reasons or don't want to be quoted by name for self-interested reasons. In the end, using such catch-all sourcing, even the author cannot truly judge how much meat there is in the stew or from what beast it comes.

Now, the standard celebrity PR manual would have recommended that Ailes ignore the Sherman book. After all, it is a book, and who reads books? And without direct access to its subject, it exists in a limbo of the speculative and questionable.

But Ailes, a fabled political consultant, operates from a campaign playbook that says don't let your enemies tell your story. Accordingly, he responded to the book in a combat-ready way, making himself into the ogreish Goliath and the author into a schleppy David.

In a highly politicized media world, it is often the objections of your opponents that help make you seem powerful and courageous.

Fox News takes much of its righteousness and delight from the liberal apoplexy it inspires. Sherman now thrillingly benefits from Ailes' outrage.

Arguably, Sherman has failed in the most important aspect of his journalistic effort: Lacking charm or wiles, he didn't get access, pretty much the price of entry for a serious biographer. (Curiously, the loquacious Ailes is actually rather easy to get to.)

But Ailes' objections make the book newsworthy. What is it that Ailes is so objecting to? To answer that question, The New York Times was able to spin a story highlighting various quotable assertions from the book, absent all context and without actually checking any of the details. (In 1991, the Times ran a similar unverified piece based on an advance copy of Kelley's biography of Nancy Reagan. The story met with great journalistic condemnation, and the paper's then editor, Max Frankel, admitted that running it was a terrible mistake.)

Books have become totemic rather than narrative or analytic. The top-selling category of books — political tracts — are bought not principally to be read, but because of their symbolic value, their identity politics, for the way they confirm who you think you are.

Sherman and Random House hope they have found in Ailes a symbol to make liberals froth and buy books. The cut-and-paste method, the interviewing the 30-years-past girlfriend technique, the making the idle remark the smoking gun, turns journalism into not just hackery, but into a political keepsake.

Sherman, somewhat disingenuously, keeps saying that Ailes is a larger-than-life figure on the level of William Randolph Hearst. But Hearst's story, as told in Citizen Kane by Orson Welles, whom Hearst disdained and refused to speak to, has the key distinction of actually being fiction.